COIN-OR Cup 2013 Winners Announced

The winners of the 2013 COIN-OR Cup are Miles Lubin, Julian Hall, Cosmin Petra, and Mihai Anitescu for a parallel, distributed-memory simplex implementation for large-scale block-angular LPs, motivated by energy applications of two-stage stochastic programming. At the core of the implementation is specialized linear algebra for factorizing and solving linear systems with the simplex basis matrix at each iteration. COIN-OR libraries, in particular the CoinFactorization class of the CoinUtils package, were a foundation for their implementation.

In addition to ranking highly on the stated criteria of effective use and impact, this submission stood out to the judges for its close alignment with the interests of the COIN-OR originators. The judges also were impressed that the submitters were looking so deeply into the CoinFactorization code. This is an especially difficult task given the provenance of this part of COIN.